The sweet stink of success

Jan. 18, 2006 | Armed with a little rake and pan, Grady Moorer walks in a gridlike pattern across the house's expansive front yard like he's mapping out a crime scene.

"After a while you learn where the dog poops," he says wisely. "They're really creatures of habit. And you can always tell if there's a visitor dog -- the poop is a different color, consistency and shape." Moorer, aka "ScooperDude," has been scooping up dog excrement in Charlotte, N.C., in a professional capacity, since 2003. Prior to that he owned a construction business, and while surfing the Web for some tools came across Pooper-Scooper.com, an international directory of dog-waste removal services. Intrigued by the financial possibilities, Moorer invested in some advertising, slapped a ScooperDude sticker on his Ford pickup, and embarked on a new career.

"At first my wife thought I had lost my mind," says Moorer, 56. "But then the money started rolling in, and she said, 'Hey, this is pretty good.'"

Moorer takes his unorthodox career seriously. When asked how many clients he has, he declines to tell me. ("I don't want my competition knowing," he says.) Nor does he care to discuss the variety or ick factor of the waste he encounters. "No poop is icky," he says. "It's my business to deal with whatever is there." In fact, aside from the occasional soiled pair of shoes or sunburn, Moorer says his job has few drawbacks. "I make my own hours. I get to work outside. I go into these yards and the dogs are just tickled to death to see me. I scoop real quick, and then move on to the next yard. I love it." Is he ever embarrassed when people ask him what he does for a living?

"No, I provide a service," he replies simply. "They pay people to do just about everything else, why not this?"

Moorer's main competition in Charlotte is Dan Williams. I catch up with Williams while he's plying his trade in Gina Folk's backyard. Folk, who has three young children and two Labradors named Taj and Barney, says she hired Williams because she wanted to "reclaim her backyard." And for just two dogs, the Labradors do indeed deposit an astounding number of land mines during a week's time -- enough to almost fill up Williams' eight-gallon trash can.

Prior to becoming a poop "entre-manure," as he likes to call himself, Williams, 44, worked at Florida's Kennedy Space Center in data management. He was laid off after the Challenger disaster in 1986. Shortly after that, while he was sitting around in his buddy's backyard drinking a few beers, Williams had an epiphany. "Kids and dogs were running around everywhere, and poop was everywhere," Williams says. "I told him he needed to clean it up. That's when he said he'd rather hire someone to do it."

Like Moorer, Williams invested in some advertising and decals for his truck, and ran his own poop-scooping business for about five years in Florida before he and his wife moved to Charlotte in 2001. Once he arrived in North Carolina, Williams came up with his "Scooperman" persona, including a full-body, Superman-style outfit, which he wears to area dog shows to promote his business. Apparently it's working. He now has more than 50 regular customers, including a Carolina Panthers football player and a NASCAR driver.

Williams is a little more forthcoming about the dirty details of his job. He relates one story about a client who owned two huge mastiffs that both suffered from chronic diarrhea. "On good days the poop had the consistency of toothpaste," he says. Fortunately, Williams had a friend who worked at a pet store who convinced the woman to change her dogs' diet, which improved the end result.

"It saved my life," Williams says.

There was also the morning he arrived at a new client's house during the middle of winter. It had rained the night before, so everything was frozen over, including their Great Dane's many calling cards. "The waterlogged poops were frozen solid to the ground," Williams says. "They didn't smell, but I had to chop these miniature brown icebergs loose. The shock of striking the frozen turds with my hoe went through my frozen hands all the way up to my shoulders. That was a long morning, but I got it done."

After being in the poop business for nearly seven years, Williams has become quite the excrement expert. "Poop comes in different colors, shapes and a wide array of odors," he says. "I think that I'm actually getting good enough to tell what brand of food the dog is eating."

If he has any complaints about his chosen career, it's what he calls "scooper's elbow." When it rains, he explains, the poop gets saturated with water and becomes heavy. "I get a shooting pain in my elbow after picking it up all day," he says. "Maybe I should design ergonomic poop-scooping tools?"

While Williams admits that he used to get embarrassed when people asked what he did for a living, he relishes talking about it now. "My job usually takes over the conversation," he says. "You've got to have a sense of humor in this business or you'll never make it."

Moorer and Williams are far from the only people in the pet poop business. In fact the poop-scooping industry is about 30 years old, with more than 300 companies in the United States and Canada. They even have their own association -- the Association of Professional Animal Waste Specialists (aPaws). A group of concerned scoopers started the organization in 2003 to increase awareness of the importance of proper animal waste disposal. The association, which has close to 100 members, also hosts the annual Pooper Scooper Round-Up. The three-day conference offers workshops, guest speakers and the always-popular Turd Herding Contest, in which participants compete to see who can pick up the most dog turds (technically sun-blackened pieces of potatoes) the fastest. The next Pooper Scooper Round-Up is scheduled for February in Orlando, Fla.

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